Sony SLT-A77 studio comparison samples

We have just posted studio test samples from the Sony SLT-A77. In the process of working on the forthcoming in-depth review of the A77, we have shot our standard studio test scene. To allow easy comparison with its peers, we have now added these shots to our comparison tool, found in our existing reviews. The A77 can now be selected from the pull-down list within any review or our standalone comparsion tool.

Comments

We shot our first wedding last Saturday with our new A77 and a Minolta 17-35. The room the wedding a reception were in was dimly lit with yellow/orange light and the A77 handled it very well on Auto! We shot almost 700 shots and all but 2 were very useable. The camera handles well, is lightning fast, great color, and the only shot that had noise was one where the flash didn't fire. We've also shot hundreds of daylight test shots at different stops and they are stunning! We tested with MINOLTA 28-135, 70-210 MINOLTA beercan, Minolta 17-35, and a MINOLTA 100-300 APO.

To rgnewell: You obviously either haven't shot with the better Minolta lenses or had bad copies. Our 2 28-135MM Minnys shoot as nice as primes. Also try a Minny 20MM 2.8, and a 100-400 APO and tell us they are not great

We really like this camera and feel it is worth the extra money for the upgrade to our A55s. For wedding photographers this came is XLNT!

I thought this was finally the perfect camera and just about per-ordered one, but then I compared the A77 with other cameras I have been looking at and compared them at an ISO that I would most likely shoot - 800. I was surprised to see that the even the Canon T3i at ISO 800 RAW out performed the Sony for noise. What the heck? So much for the "more pixels with more noise equals less pixels with less noise" argument. Or there is something very flawed with this test setup that does not allow the higher res to work to it's advantage in this comparison.

Sony is showing some great technical innovation with the SLT cameras, but the A77 samples are disappointing at high ISO. In raw it looks like the A77 gives up a full stop to the Nikon D7000 and half a stop to Sony's own A35. Likely as a result, the A77 high ISO jpegs show loss of detail and look plastic. It is particularly surprising that the A35 images look better than those from the A77. Hopefully there is a fix in the works.

I am a 5D2 & D3x user. RAW to RAW, I have to admit that the SLT-A77 beats the 5D2 although there could be sample variation involved in the 5D2 used or "sample variation" in the testing methodology ( DPR doesn't provide a D3x image for their comparison tool that I could find). Nonetheless, this is one huge reason why Canon and Nikon should get off their azzes and update their FF cams. Noteworthy: the A900 RAW beat the SLT-A77 by a smidge.

I see too much artifacting in these jpegs for serious use. Compared to my 5D mark 2 or Nikon d3S files they arn't very good. I believe the pixels are just too small to hold together. Files might work OK with a studio setup, but if you push at all on these files they are going to fall appart. Camera makers need to move in a different direction, different technology or stay around 12 or 14 mp with a APS or simillar size chip.

With the public release of ACR 6.5 the a77 is now officially supported.Any chance for a re-processing of these samples?I see a deviation in black point as a starter at ISO 100 already...

Besides, over in the forum 1037 your studio shots are already being reprocessed with huge success:http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1037&message=39469520Part of the success is applying appropriate processing parameters - which of course is applicable for any cam that provides RAW output. It just is a proven track on this web page that ACR and Sony RAW don't work together at best.

My LX3 and S60 are small and produce reasonable images, but I search for better ones. After looking at all Sony SLR images I've wondered if Leica lenses work on Sony as Minolta lenses while good are not great. Despite the high ASP (profit) that camera manufactures get from SLRs, they are a pain in the shoulder. I have many heavy Canon L lenses and a film back that produce good scanned images from Velvia film. I've compared these to digital images from my compact digital cameras and see little difference, but scanning is a pain.

I think the sony is very cool, and it has some great Innovations .I don't think they need to have this kind of pixel count, 35mm lenses can only resolve so much information, if they start to make lenses that can great, but 119 lines per millimetre or so is not even close 12mp let alone 25mp at a 1.5 crop........

Now maybe people will stop picking on the 'ageing' sensor in the new PEN cameras as this NEW Sony sensor has apparently sunk to that level.Like the PEN cameras, lets all look at the positives of these cameras and not just the high ISO performance.

There's no point of convincing people to like this camera if this is not for them. I have tried a pre-production copy of the A77 last Saturday at an event sponsored by Sony UK and all I can say is it's a totally different experience. I have an a700 that I have been using for the last four years but the experience I had with the A77 after using it for only a day was completely different - in a VERY positive way. I don't need to mention all the features you get with this camera compared to the more expensive ones out there but there's only one thing I hope people will do when they see this camera in their local camera shops. JUST TRY IT!

Look at the image centre, the focus target, the playing card (which is a substantial amount behind the focus target) and the wall – I'm quite sure the image was focused by AF, and the AF missed the focus target in the centre and hit focus either on the playing card or even on the wall.

Stopped down to f/9 with an APS-C sensor, it's of course harder to notice than, say, with a 35mm full frame SLR at f/8, like the Nikon D3 (which shows everything perfectly in focus except for the playing card, which is massively out of focus).

ISO is merely good, not excellent, however dynamic range and colour resolving is awesome (see D X O M A R K). Arguablly real photographers with fast glass don't need to shot over ISO 800, although 1600 and 3200 can be useful.The current obession with high ISO performance should not deter real photographers, this is an outstanding camera.As M9 sales show, it is preferable to have detailed base ISO results that trash every other FF camera on the market then excellent really high ISO performance.

+1!!! Having read all the above, I have a feeling, that nobody shoot at the ISO lower than 1600... If U prefer 7D with less noise but bad DR and colours, it's Your choice, but it doesn't mean, that 7D is better camera...

Wow what these test are so different from image resource . com, the sony is at the bottom end of the test there.There seems to be money changing hands here,the canon was better at 1600,but the nikon clearly was the best of them at 1600 iso. I use a Canon 7D and it's very good, but i do work at a camera store and i have done my owen test, and the nikon seemed to be a bit better in the red's for sure, the 5D shots here are clearly out of focus, nice eh, and i know that this camera will crush all of them buy two stops.

The sensor is clearly straining under the weight of that translucent mirror and all those pixels, low shutter lag live view comes at a price. That said, seeing what the sensor sees is a revelation in photography, in old terms its seeing what the film sees which is fundamentally a mighty step forward in the pursuit of photographic excellence.

Perhaps the poorer high iso performance will be offset by the improved perception of final outcome that low shutter lag live view gives, only time will tell. Some of the a55 shots I've seen with better glass have been stellar.

The jpeg's look pretty good the raw's should get better with a more optimized raw converter. Another thing that concerns me is the need for really good glass for this and the Nex-7 with their 24mp APS-c sensor's....I guess you'll have to go primes or Zeiss $$

There's no evidence 'it's the pixels'. The A33 with lower MP looks just about as bad, and there's the fact that a 100% crop of the 24MP is going to be a much tighter crop of a given scene. It could also be that Sony just didn't do as good a job with this sensor, and of course there's the fact that it's losing 1/2 a stop to that pellicle (which is not worth the sacrifice in light, IMO).

It's a Beta-Version. We use those pretty frequently on many of our reviews as, very often, there is not yet any official ACR support for the cameras when we are testing them. We also use our own processing as detailed on our RAW sample pages. Images are processed in ACR with all sharpening and NR turned off. Sharpening is then added in Photoshop via an unsharp mask.

anagram4wander2"Bye DPReview - That sucked"Not only DPR then, go to DxO, in SNR measurements put on screen mode and put A77 against D7000, nikon is whole step better than sony which is pretty much what I see in DPR's samples

Comon anagram4, the RAW converter version, type, brand or whatever makes only a slight difference to noise appearance if any. Sony just has a very good JPEG engine in the camera. Blaming DPREVIEW for this is a cop-out. You should be ashamed of yourself!

There's no myth. The size of the pixels and density of this sensor is still well ahead of compact sensors that can still turn out _relatively_ low read noise. The MP isn't the culprit here, it's the pellicle mirror sapping 1/3 of the incoming light.

Stop looking at pixel level noise it tells you nothing about different cameras with different resolution. A 100% view on the Sony A77 corresponds to a massive enlargement, a print several feet long and you would not stand 3" to examine a real print of that size. The ONLY fair way to compare the two cameras is to equalize their pixel counts, and usually you would downrez the A77 to 5N size. If so you would find most of that stop difference disappeared, but the A77 file might still have more detail.

I would also wait for full RAW support from ACR rather than look at terrible jpgs.

When looking at dpreview's RAW samples at ISO 3200, Sony A77 looks indeed much noisier when compared to Canon 7D. But when you look at DxOMark measurements, noise difference at this ISO level is pretty much neglectible. What could justify this?...

AFAIK DXO measures noise in the midtones. If you look at the samples here, you'll notice that the 7D has quite a bit darker shadows than the A77 (whatever the reason for that may be). The darker shadows in turn help to conceal the noise as you will notice, when you manipulate the A77 samples accordingly.Nevertheless the shadow noise of the A77 isn't something to brag about...

Subjectively, the A77 images look much noisier than the 7D and this is where DxO misses the mark - pun intended. Their noise measuring instrument obviously operates on different parameters than the human eye. Pity because photography is all about what the eye sees.

There's something going on with the Sony RAW files ever since the introduction of the A35. The A35 has the exact same sensor as the A55, but looks quite bad in comparison. The same blotchyness is present in the A77 RAW files as seen here. In fact, the A77 downsampled to A35 looks pretty similar, noise wise.But both their DXO measurements don't translate into the visual performance one would expect and to me that's a first. The A35 unsurprisingly showed the same results in DXOMark as the A55, yet visual performance is a non sequitur. Likewise for the A77. Will be interesting to find out what 's going on here.

It was interesting to see that the panasonic GH2 with its even smaller pixels (on a smaller sensor) delivers more detail at ISO 800 and 1600. To me the new kid from sony looks like a 15yo who is almost to strong to walk.

It's strange, but i see the opposite... Choose ISO 1600 and look at the playing cards, for example... And compare colours with that of 7D )) Did U still think, that Canon's sensor better with such colours. Ha-ha ))

Downsize the samples guys !!! downsize the samples !!! it will make the a77's samples looks as clean as tears of child, it will make disappear all this nasty noise, correct the colors and make comeback all lost details and it will be better than any other aps-c camera , just downsize them !!!I am just kidding :)

Not a myth. There is a reason people in these forums state small pictures posted in forums doesn't tell us much about noise performance. I can show you 0.5 MP image from my A500 at ISO 12800 with no noise. But believe me, it's there at 12MP. ;)

http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/Cameras/Compare-Camera-Sensors/Compare-cameras-side-by-side/%28appareil1%29/734|0/%28brand%29/Sony/%28appareil2%29/619|0/%28brand2%29/Canon - any questions? Aren't excellent DR and color depth more important at the majority of shooting conditions?

I think there are people here out to get Sony. When I look at the samples, I see it differently. The Nikion shows smoothing (or blur) especially at the edges, and the Pentax is almost identical. The only things different from Pentax are the crop and the color curves.

the A77 is about a stop behind at the pixel level, if you normalize it it is about half a stop behind... and that's probably the light loss of the translucent mirror.

I expect the NEX-7 to be at the same level of the 16MPX sensor when size is normalized... meaning that the increase in resolution is allowing real gain of resolution at base iso, and no real loss at high isos...

The Image tests are out. Fitting 24 MP in a APS-C Sensor has made the sensor more noisy in RAW mode and in JPEG mode the sharpness is lost due to high Noise reduction applied. This sensor needs even better in-camera post processing to give better results in high ISO.

I replaced the D7000 with the NEX C3 in the Studio Comparison quartet and I'm leaning toward this NEX for 3 reasons. 1) I still don't have a mirror-less one in my collection. 2) It equals or even slightly edges the 7D in raw. 3) I already have the 7D.

Now post the one with the IS on. Nikon and Canon users can't test this unfortunately. On a Sony cam take a shot with IS on and one with it off. Up to 1/160 there is a difference in critical sharpness. Nice shot btw.

I replaced D7000 w/ NEX C3 before I moved the cursor (in 3200 ISO) raw to the Greek looking face then to that Margaret Thatcher looking woman then to that chick in the Kodak frame and observed that: the 5Dmk2 was on top; followed by NEX C3, then the 7D then the A77. It was only on the Thatcher-like face that I had some difficulty choosing between the 7D and the A77.

I did the same thing in 3200 JPEG and found that in Thatcher-like face the Canons were better. In the Kodak chick I saw a a close duel between the 7D and NEX C3 for here the Sony appeared cleaner but the Canon seemed to render the eyes better. The best rendering over all was from the 5Dmk2 while the A77's capture was at the bottom looking like it used a watercolor filter.

From these quick glances I can say that: 1. The Canons here make better JPEG than Sony. 2. The current APSC sensor technology still can't beat the 2nd generation FF sensor. 3. In terms of raw, the Sony 16MP sensor is currently the best APSC sensor.

At a third of a stop beyond f/8? Nothing that would be visible to the eye. In that case, all of dpr's test shots would be diffraction limited, since they are mostly shot at this or eqv. apertures. The GH2 photo is shot at f/6.3.

I enlarged the GH2 photo at ISO800 to SLT77 size, and it showed similar noise but much more detail. I'm sure the SLT77 is a nice camera, but maybe it's time for Sony to think about lenses that can actually handle all the megapixels without weighing twice times as much as the camera?

Nah... not literally, but most of the high quality Zeiss glass in A-mount is on the heavy side, up to and around 1kg. Nikon and Canon aren't any better in this respect, but compared to the lenses for the GH2, they are huge, apparently without offering much more when it comes to optical qualities.

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